From the virtual datacenter to the cloud

Monthly Archives: January 2012

The more we talk to our customers the more we hear that they are focused on two major tasks in 2012. The first is to extend their virtualization footprint by virtualizing more of their business critical applications (e.g., Exchange, CRM, etc.). The second is to accelerate their implementation of a private cloud, and extend it from their dev/test environments into production. For the success of both these initiatives, they recognize that their ability to ensure the performance and health of their virtual infrastructure is critical.

That’s why we’re very pleased to announce the general availability of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. On main stage we publicly rolled out the largest IT Management launch in our company’s history announcing three new Management Suites: VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite, VMware vFabric Application Management Suite, and VMware IT Business Management Suite. These solutions allow our customers to remove the complexity of managing IT not just at the infrastructure layer, where VMware has traditionally focused, but across all layers of IT. Together, the three management suites deliver on our mission to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era and achieve the vision of IT as a Service.

As our customers virtualize their business critical applications and move to the cloud, the limitations of traditional management approaches are becoming increasingly apparent, as is the need for a new approach. At VMware, we’re re-thinking infrastructure management. Our approach recognizes that key operations management disciplines—performance, capacity and configuration management—have become inseparable in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The ability to ensure infrastructure performance and health is impacted by fluidly changing configurations and the sharing of capacity from a myriad of sources. The answer to this challenge isn’t more monitoring – most enterprises have more than enough monitoring solutions. The answer is more intelligence in the form of analytics to make sense of the millions of performance, capacity and configuration metrics these systems generate.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is built around VMware’s conviction that today’s complex and highly dynamic infrastructures demand an integrated, converged approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. Rather than generating more monitoring data, it collects and analyzes performance data from across the entire IT stack. Its patented analytics correlate abnormalities to generate actionable intelligence that identifies the root cause of building performance problems[m2] .

The vCenter Operations Management Suite builds on many of the unique capabilities introduced with the launch of vCenter Operations 1.0 last year, while delivering a number of new innovations. Chief among these is a new Operations Management dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of the overall status of your virtual and cloud environments with three “supermetrics”: health (current behavior and problems); risk (potential for future problems); and efficiency (how well your resources are being utilized). If there’s a problem, our new smart alerts will give you a pro-active warning, so you can drill all the way down to the individual VM or underlying infrastructure if necessary to resolve it before your end users are impacted.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is ultimately about providing you with greater visibility to better manage your infrastructure and the applications that run on it. For example, we’ve significantly extended the integration of configuration and capacity management. You can now see change events that occur inside your VMs, not just at the host level. And you can model your capacity to see its impact on future performance. With this greater visibility you can better maintain compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift, while increasing your resource utilization efficiency. Today’s release also includes a new application discovery and dependency capability that provides application-awareness for users of vCenter Operations Management Suite to help with impact analysis, disaster recovery planning and datacenter and application migration projects.

If you, like so many of our other customers, are thinking about virtualizing one or more of your most critical business applications, or if you’re ready to make the move to the cloud, I encourage you to learn more about the vCenter Operations Management Suite. A great place to start is today’s blog posting by Martin Klaus, Senior Product Marketing Manager for vCenter Operations, which provides a more detailed overview of the Suite’s new features and capabilities.